Far Eastern Economic Review: Hong Kong - A Time for Prayer

Falun Gong Fears The New Laws Will Be Used Against Them

By David Lague
Issue cover-dated October 10, 2002

The Falun Gong spiritual movement is seen as one of the more likely potential targets of Hong Kong's proposed new national security laws.

The government is proposing to bolster the city's existing tough restrictions on foreign political organizations playing a role in local politics or threatening national security.

New laws would ban an organization that commits or intends to commit treason, secession, sedition, subversion or spying. Organizations could also be banned if they are linked with mainland groups that have been outlawed on national security grounds. Organizing, supporting or serving as an office bearer in banned groups would also be a crime.

"The Hong Kong government certainly wants to use the law to suppress us," Falun Gong spokesman Kan Hung-cheung told the territory's English-language South China Morning Post newspaper on September 24. "It allows the Chinese Communist Party's influence to be extended to Hong Kong, but I am not afraid."

Top Hong Kong government officials have rejected suggestions that Falun Gong, the target of a sweeping crackdown on the mainland [slanderous word omitted], would be in danger when the proposals become law early next year. The officials point out that the Communist Party has never banned a group on national security grounds.

Instead, provisions of China's criminal code are usually used to outlaw groups that Beijing perceives as a threat, such as the Falun Gong. However, critics in Hong Kong contend that the new laws give Beijing the option of banning a group as a threat to national security, which would then oblige Hong Kong to take similar action.

However, Secretary for Security Regina Ip, speaking on a local radio phone-in programme on September 25, said that Falun Gong might not be outlawed in Hong Kong even if the mainland decided to ban it on national security grounds.

Ip noted that local Falun Gong spokesman Kan had denied there was any link between the mainland movement and local Falun Gong [practitioners]. She agreed this was so, because the local group was actually affiliated with its founder, Li Hongzhi, who had settled in the United States.

http://www.feer.com/articles/2002/0210_10/p015region.html